Description:
This study assesses the quality of seven commercial project management packages to schedule precedence- and resource-constrained projects. We introduce the basic project scheduling model and give a short survey of optimal and heuristic Solution methods. Furthermore, we outline extensions of the basic model which are implicitly employed in some of the packages. Since the implemented methods are proprietary, we measure the quality of the Software in terms of the deviation from the optimal project length. As benchmark instances we use a set of Problems generated under a factorial design. Statistical tests are performed in order to investigate the impact of the problem parameters and to detect significant differences between the quality of the Software packages.